‘RAMageddon’ making stuff cost more
by Bob Gibbs · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Every day, Americans are quietly being squeezed by a crisis most of them have never heard of.
It is not showing up on the front page yet, but it is showing up in the price of your next laptop, your next car, your new appliances and just about everything else with a charger or power cord.
The reasons: A global memory chip shortage driven by demand for artificial intelligence and a federal government that is watching from the sidelines.
The biggest AI companies in the world, the ones spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers and training models, are consuming memory chips at a rate the global supply chain simply cannot match.
High-bandwidth memory, the specialized RAM that powers AI servers, is sold out through the end of the year. Because making 1 gigabyte of that AI-grade memory consumes four times the manufacturing capacity of standard RAM, every chip that goes into an AI server is a chip that doesn’t go into your phone, your car or your hospital’s medical equipment.
The Economist laid out the consumer fallout in detail earlier this year, and it has only worsened since then.
The result is a phenomenon that industry insiders have started calling “RAMageddon.” Memory prices have surged 40% or more in just the first quarter of 2026 alone. Price inflation on some components exceeds 1,000%.
These price spikes do not remain confined to the semiconductor market either. They flow downstream, into every product that depends on chips, which is almost everything. This isn’t going away anytime soon. The chairman of SK Group, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, said in March that supply is unlikely to catch up with demand until 2030. This forecast should alarm anyone planning to buy a car, computer or smartphone in the next few years.
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The people who pay for all this are not the AI giants. Those companies have locked in supply through long-term agreements and have the capital to weather the storm. The people who pay are consumers who are shelling out more, and the auto manufacturers that cannot finish cars sitting in the lot waiting for chips that never arrive.
Washington has finally begun to take notice. A recent congressional hearing specifically examined the semiconductor ecosystem. The committee chairman, Rep. Gus Bilirakis, Florida Republican, made clear that chip vulnerabilities now pose direct risks to economic stability and national security.
Rep. Kathy Castor, Florida Democrat, put it plainly: The AI-driven chip demand surge “is driving a shortage right now of memory chips, which is raising prices for consumer devices at a time when Americans are already struggling to afford basic goods like gas and groceries.”
Mr. Bilirakis and Ms. Castor are both right. The hearing was a good start. The witnesses were serious, the questions were largely the right ones, and there was at least bipartisan agreement on the basic stakes.
Yet a hearing is not a policy, and the structural forces driving this are not going to fix themselves.
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The federal government must address this crisis head-on — and quickly. The White House, along with the Commerce Department and other federal agencies, needs to adopt policies that ensure American companies, not just a few big AI firms, have access to chips.
Sure, those massive AI companies will fight back, but they are responsible for this crisis. They are the reason prices are rising across every product with a chip.
The AI boom is real, and in many ways, that is a great thing. Right now, however, the biggest AI companies are cornering the global chip supply, and everybody else is paying the price. Washington has the tools to act, and it must.
• Former Rep. Bob Gibbs represented Ohio’s 7th Congressional District from 2011 to 2023.
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